What's so great about stdClass?

objects vs arrays

[cameraman]

I started doing object oriented programming in C++ right at 20 years ago and I definitely like classes where they're appropriate. I'm comfortable with it and I understand the concepts.

Right now I'm writing a wrapper class for imap, and what I'm not understanding is why so many of the imap functions return stdClass objects - what's the advantage? I'd just as soon they return associative arrays; they're a whole lot easier to run through.

What is the advantage of a class that has variables but no member functions? What am I missing?

[cameraman]

Ok I just ran across object iteration [php.net] which is a whole lot easier than the way I was getting properties out via Reflection, but I still don't see why you wouldn't just return an assoc array...